01
The Painting
A story told across two meters of cloth
Painted in Nepal in 1712, this bilampau, a horizontal narrative painting of the Newar community, recounts the legend of Bunga Dyo, a deity beloved in the Kathmandu Valley since the 7th century. He is known by many names: Karunamaya, the Compassionate One; Rato Matsyendranath (or Rato Macchindranath); Avalokiteshvara (or Avalokiteshwor); Lokeshwor; and, in Patan, Bunga Dyo, the god of Bungamati. Across three registers of the painting, each episode follows the next from left to right: gods and kings, processions and offerings, all rendered on the cloth of the bilampau. These scenes work together like a storybook, conveying the legend of the Rato Macchindranath festival to its viewers.
Each register includes a line of inscriptions written in an old form of Prachalit, the Newari script, and narrates the scenes it crowns. Time has worn parts of the cloth painting and its writing, but with transliteration and translation, the story it preserves can be read again. This archive presents the painting in high resolution, with every scene and every inscription, together with the research that makes them legible: a study undertaken with the guidance of professors of Newar Buddhism in Nepal.
02
Object Details
The painting, as catalogued
The painting left Nepal and is today held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum's catalogue record, including its measurements, is reproduced here.
03
The Project
Why preserve this painting digitally?
To understand the importance of this digital archive, one must look at how these artifacts have been treated historically. For decades, paintings and sculptures from Nepal have left the country for distant museums and private collections abroad, admired for their beauty while their inscriptions were ignored and their true meaning was forgotten.
Paintings like this bilampau were meant to be read, not hung as decorative objects. They are historical documents that, when taken only as art, are silenced. What the West calls “art” was never made for aesthetic purposes. The full picture emerges only when one goes beyond the color and lines and asks the right questions. This is what the project aims to do.
This project aims to restore the bilampau’s voice. It seeks to digitally preserve the painting by providing high-resolution scans, documenting its historical Newar inscriptions, dating its donors and figures, and passing down the rituals it conveys, so that this information isn’t just preserved but made available to everyone. The project brings together scholars and masters of Newar Buddhism from Nepal who are best equipped to interpret these bilampaus, generating reliable information for future research and education.
04
The Living Tradition
Bunga Dyo and the chariot festival
Bunga Dyo is not a figure of the past. Revered by Buddhists and Hindus alike for over a millennium as a bringer of rain, the deity divides each year between the village of Bungamati, his original home and the source of his name, and his shrine in Patan.
Each year, in one of the Kathmandu Valley’s oldest and grandest processions, Bunga Dyo is drawn through the streets of Patan in a towering wooden chariot built anew for the journey. The festival commemorates the deity’s arrival in the valley and the end of a long, twenty-year drought, brought about by the deity’s compassion. The Bunga Dyo painting belongs to that living story: episodes of the legend, painted three centuries ago, from a tradition that continues today.
Read the legend →05
The Festival, Today
Experience this year's procession
Filmed on the streets of the Kathmandu Valley during the 2026 Rato Macchindranath festival. Transport yourself to the heart of the tradition.
Explore the Painting
Two ways to look